Invoke
by agentdownfall
Summary: A Crossfit fan-fiction that stars the lovely Christmas Abbott as a crossfit box owner and detective.
1. Chapter 1

The clock above the barbells ticked past 12:45am. She stared at the whiteboard which had been sectioned into five squares with blue painter's tape. The first listed the announcements. Someone cancelled the 7:30am workout for the following day. The square below it listed the warm-up and the cool-down. The next square, the movements and prescription for that day. The largest square of the five listed the names of each gym member who had completed the workout, along with their score. The best time of the day had gone to Dusty and she was not surprised.

The gym was located at 1701 South Saunders Street, two miles south of the police department, in a sleepy industrial park. It was a standalone, rectangular building, with two large garage doors facing Penmarc Drive. It was rather inconspicuous. White with sea blue trim around the doorways. It was not the kind of gym where a person can get lost in the rows of elliptical machines, treadmills, and flat screen TVs mounted to tastefully painted walls. The only machines were the rowers, standing at attention against the south wall, and a couple of Airdynes pushed in a corner. A foreboding, black, steel structure, not unlike something found in a schoolyard, was bolted firmly to the floor in the center of the main room. The space resembled an empty mover's box, and so that's what it had been called—the box.

The box was quiet except for the snuffled breathing of her English bulldog, Fran, who had curled up in a dog bed in the box's office. Even with the door nearly closed, she could hear Fran snort as she readjusted in her sleep.

At 12:47 in the morning, it wasn't Memorial Day anymore. Christmas had spent the previous day at the police station writing case summaries and filing reports that should have been done the previous week. It had been a relatively peaceful Monday, as though the criminals of Raleigh had gone easy on the police force out of respect for the holiday. Instead of responding to calls in the field, she had quarantined herself in her windowless office with no fewer than five pots of black coffee, and tended to paperwork long overdue.

She hadn't realized how the hours had melted away until she checked the time on her phone. It was pushing midnight. _Shit_ , she thought, as she realized that Fran had been at the gym alone since Dusty had locked up for the night. He usually fed her while checking emails after the last session of the evening. He would stay with her until she had finished and alerted him that she needed to go out one last time for the night. The last workout of the day had been scheduled to start at 6:00pm and while most warm-ups, workouts, and cool-downs were finished within an hour, Memorial day was an outlier. Memorial day meant that the gym did _Murph_.

It was done once a year in memory of a Navy Lieutenant who had been killed in Afghanistan. The workout was written in Dusty's blocky handwriting: _For Time - 1 mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats, 1 mile run_. A time cap had been set at 1 hour. Anyone still working through the repetitions when the timer hit 60 minutes was allowed to stop.

Christmas' eyes tracked toward the score square. Dusty's name was boxed off in red dry-erase marker. He had completed the workout with the 3:00pm group. His time read 36 minutes, 7 seconds. She went over to the rack of logbooks, and pulled Dusty's from the coaches' shelf. She flipped back the pages until she hit Memorial day the previous year. The same blocky handwriting read: _Murph: 38:33; personal record_ in black ink. _He PR'd it this year_ , she thought. She closed his logbook and placed it back on the shelf.

Christmas checked the time again. 12:55am. If she started now, she'd be finished and on her way home within the hour. She imagined falling into her bed with Fran spooned in the curve of her back. She walked to the back door and propped it open with a kettlebell. She grabbed the remote for the timer hanging above the white board and zeroed it. She gently closed the office door to deter Fran from waking and following her out for the runs.

This is it, she thought. _Three, two, one. Go._


	2. Chapter 2

Christmas finished her training at the police academy at twenty three. She was five feet three inches tall, weighing-in at only 115 pounds. There were no shortage of naysayers who questioned her ability to be a police officer, but her parents had seemed to support her. They sent her the occasional check to cover tuition or textbooks. Christmas usually spent it on liquor and take-out. They hadn't been to visit her, but she still got cards on her birthday. The last time she had seen her parents was at Christmastime the previous year. She stayed in a motel. The house dredged too many memories.

She hadn't made any real friends at the academy, and after graduation she felt a twinge of uncertainty in her choice of profession. She browsed entry level police positions in greater Raleigh, but found nothing that compelled her. She had moved to Raleigh shortly after she leaving home at eighteen.

After a month of rejecting job offers after dull interviews, she called a friend with whom she graduated from high school in Lynchburg.

"I want to go to the Middle East." It was the first thing that came from her mouth when Mark picked up the phone.

"Christmas! Hey! It's been a long time. How are you?"

"I'm fine. I want to go to the Middle East. How do I get there?"

"You mean you want to enlist? I heard you were finishing up at the academy."

"I finished. I'm certified."

"Can't find a job? Enlisting is usually a last resort."

"I haven't applied for anything yet. I'm exploring my options. I don't want to enlist, but I will if I have to. I want to go over there. I've got to get out of here for awhile."

Mark laughed a kind and honest laugh, "I'll do my best to help you, Christmas, but if you need to get out of Virginia, you can always take a road trip to DC to hang out for a weekend. I haven't seen you in years."

"What do you know about contract work?" she asked abruptly.

"I know the government contracts a lot of work to private companies, all of which are manned by civilians. They keep the wheel turning over there during wartime. We're not training the nation's finest to make their own lunch, we're training them to defend liberty."

"How many companies have contracts over there?"

"Hundreds, I think."

"Do you have any connections?"

"My buddy's got some connections to a firm with a fancy name. Ill give him a call, if you want."

"What do they do?" asked Christmas.

"As far as I know, a whole lot of dirty laundry."


	3. Chapter 3

She was halfway through the set of 300 squats when she first checked her time. The red numbers ticked 27 minutes, 32 seconds. She continued dipping down into a low, controlled squats, her toes pointed forward with her arms extended parallel in front of her. One fifty eight, one fifty nine, one sixty, she counted silently, bending her knees, her gaze fixed on the letter "V" in INVOKE stenciled on the north wall. Her thighs burned and sweat dripped from her small frame onto rubber mats. She was intoxicated by the work of pushing her body to its limit. It was during the these workouts that she would get lost in case details. She would imagine crime scenes, sequence events, make timelines, and derive questions that needed to be answered. On the other end of a set of unbroken double-unders, Christmas would often find that she had a new perspective-a direction to follow.

Two thirty-five, two thirty-six. The wind tugged at the back door, and it hit against the kettle bell with a thud. Christmas heard a low, reflexive growl, rumble from behind the office door. Don't worry about me, Fran. You're a lousy guard dog at best. The timer read 32 minutes when she flew out the back door for the last part of the workout, the second one mile run.

Christmas had mapped out the standard one-mile route on the second day of owning the property. It was a grand loop that avoided intersections and stoplights as much as possible. Leaving the backdoor, Christmas swiftly headed east on Penmarc Drive, and continued eastward when it turned into Water Works Street. Her heart rate was even, and she settled into a pace just as she hooked right onto Walnut Creek Trail. The paved trail ran through what was left of a wooded area. Christmas was sure that thirty years ago, the whole area had been blanketed in trees. It was dark, but she had run this trail what had felt like thousands of times before. Enough glow from the moon and the streetlights on the Raleigh Beltline that she could make her way well enough.

The trail headed south behind a factory that manufactured and distributed pipe fittings. She could faintly hear the machinery at work, the high pitched grinding and cutting of metal. Christmas appreciated the proximity of her gym to the trail. It wasn't particularly long, but it gave her a sense of escape from the city. With at least one hundred feet of tree cover on either side of the trail, she was able to convince herself that she running back in Lynchburg, in the woods that crept up behind her childhood home.

Christmas was jolted from her thoughts of home by a long car horn on the Beltline. This isn't Lynchburg, Christmas. She panted. The car horn went quiet, and the trees rustled in the gentle wind. She could hear the intermittent swish of traffic each time the wind died down.

The trail began curving toward the west, behind an abandoned lot on the opposite side of the puny Walnut creek. The elbow of the trail was the most hidden stretch, before it ran parallel to the Beltline and spit out onto South Saunders. She considered checking her time. Instead she gently closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and centered-in on her task list for the next day.

The momentum of her run propelled her body through the air, and she hit the pavement sliding. Her forearms tore on the asphalt, and she grunted in pain. She could feel her arms were wet with blood, but was numb in her surprise. Laying on her stomach with her arms at her side, she slowly brought her knees to her chest and lifted her torso off of the ground. She sat motionless before she turned to see what had tripped her.

Looking over her right shoulder, in the dull, May moonlight , Christmas caught sight of two motionless legs stretched out across the trail.


End file.
